I was raised in a family that embraced New Thought (or New Age) traditions, along with exposure to guru teachings that my parents followed. We also practiced transcendental meditation, and on top of all this my parents consider themselves secular—go figure?
They were raised in traditional Christian households, but ended up embracing interfaith views as well in this mix.
I was also being encouraged to seek out my own spiritual beliefs, hence as an adult I have always been attracted to the theology of Unitarian Universalism.
In sum, my own spiritual history includes New Thought Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Transcendental meditation, secularism, and Unitarian Universalism—I had, at times, thought this unusual mix in my upbringing was a bit neurotic. My mother calls this well-rounded.
So, I see prayer as fluid, secular, non-secular, sacred, personal, a meditation, and yet a universal concept that embraces the power of love.
Can we see love as an ultimate form of prayer?
Our theme for this month is “prayer.” We explore this as our congregation and the world faces the pandemic of Covid-19, as we are separated from each other. How does the idea of distance affect everything, including prayer?
I contemplate how prayer, by its nature, suggests distance—wishing, petitioning, and praying for something that isn’t immediately accessible— connection to a world outside of ourselves.
How can we see the power of prayer to connect and more deeply love one another? And how do you express your love with family and community?
I want to talk about different concepts of prayer, the power of love, and how love is the path in building connection with each other and the world.
In terms our theme of “prayer,” it can be argued that prayer is at least a two-way correspondence—often one may petition, ask, or plea, in hopes a deity (i.e. a monotheistic God) will respond back to our prayers. It is also a term that invites us to ponder what is sacred and holy. Some reject the idea of prayer, while others embrace it. As Susan Manker-Seale said in our reading earlier “Prayer is the seed, the guide, the vision, the direction. But our hands must work to build a better world and our feet must walk the paths that lead to a universal, loving, respectful community.”
In a traditional Judeo-Christian sense, prayer can seem hierarchical, but also can be so much more.
Love and compassion can be expressed in prayer. In other words, how do we petition or ask for love?
I wonder if I think of prayer in a more secular way, what this looks like in hindsight.
For me, what comes to mind are a series of stories that my mother shared with me growing up about her brother. He ran away from home as a teenager and joined the Navy. Her family only heard from him a couple of times between 1957 and 1989. The year 1989 was the year my grandfather passed. My mother carried sadness because she never knew if she would see her brother again or even if he was alive during most of these years.
One of my mother’s best friends died around the same time as my grandfather—I ended up attending the funeral of the family friend–Gene. After re-engaging with her brother, my mother spoke of my uncle’s wonderful and caring presence after all these years. She never blamed him for running away. Although sad about the circumstances, she understood, and from a distance always wished him well.
In a way, I think she was always praying for him to re-engage with the family. In hindsight I think I was always praying I would have the opportunity to meet my uncle—the stories that my mom shared could come to life for me one day.
After my mother reconnected with my uncle at the funeral of my grandfather, I decided to get on a train to Mississippi from Seattle to go and meet him. I was impatient. I had waited 20 years for this opportunity.
My uncle greeted me with a bear hug. From the first conversation it was as if we had known each other our whole lives. There were no awkward introductions or anything comparable. But, he shared how he regretted be separated from my mom, my sister, and me all those years, but needed to provide himself very strong boundaries for self-care.
He wasn’t very religious, but if he were a praying man (and maybe he was), this was one of his greatest prayers—to reconnect with family members he cared about and loved. If his prayer came through, it was not a miraculous thing outside of himself that had his prayers realized, but his free-will to connect and his free-will to love. The same was true for my mother and me–reciprocating our love.
Many years later, in early 2010, my uncle suffered a severe stroke that put him in a nursing home. I went to visit again during this time. I walked into the room and his face lit up. There were only three phrases he was capable of conveying after the stroke—“Hey ya!” to show his excitement of seeing someone; “Ah, hell” was what he said when he was tired and no longer had the attention span to stay in communication, and his way of saying goodbye.
The third phrase he would say was “I love you.” It was a mantra he would say again and again repeatedly, because other than saying hello and goodbye with his own unique phrasing, this was the only way he could communicate what was on his mind “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.” He would go on for some time like this. I would interject with stories and memories of us together. And he would respond “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.”
It was our own private call and response prayer with each other.
As I mentioned earlier, one of my mother’s best friends died around the same time as my grandfather. Gene was my sister’s and my primary babysitter when my parents left town for whatever reason. They trusted him more than anyone else with my sister and me.
Shortly after Gene’s death, my mother gave me, what we considered at the time, an art piece that meant a lot to Gene—his Tibetan Prayer Wheel. I still have it. Twenty years later and 10 years after being exposed to Tibetan Buddhism, that Tibetan prayer wheel of Gene’s is on my Buddhist altar.
All the prayers in the world couldn’t keep Gene alive, as he died due to complications of AIDS–immortality was beyond either of our powers. What did remain however, was the immortality of love.
The agency to love is what I had with Gene, and also my uncle.
Also, it wasn’t only that my uncle regretted the lost years of connection between us, but he had a family including stepchildren and grandchildren. His granddaughter, Ashley, and my sister both, by chance, moved to the San Francisco Bay area within a month of each other. My sister connecting to a grandchild of my uncle’s was the last connection of the family to be healed and connected for him. I know he was holding on for something in his last year, but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. That is until several days after Ashley and my sister connected, he died in 2012.
His final prayer had been answered and he could finally rest in peace. And Gene’s prayers were answered because his primary prayer was love for all those he cared about. In our ability to love, how do we connect when we are apart in our distance with each other?
So again, I think of what various forms of prayer look like–good wishes, positive thoughts, and connection are words and terms that have come to mind in a secular context.
In Buddhist traditions, as it is a spiritual practice I have followed over the years, specifically Tibetan Buddhism, there are daily prayers for well-being to sentient beings, wherever they may reside in the world.
And Tibetan Buddhism includes prayers (or supplications) to various deities influenced by Hinduism that are considered protectors. And Buddha can be seen as an historical figure, but he is also manifested in everything that offers benefit and compassion to sentient beings in different Buddhist traditions.
There is a vertical sense in Tibetan Buddhist prayers (and in other traditions), but the prayers can be seen as horizontal, because we have a direct relation to everything in the world, including deities. Our own Buddha-nature is mirrored with the exemplar Buddha. Buddha-Nature is our own innate true nature. And everything is ultimately connected.
In Buddhism or Unitarian Universalism, prayer can come in forms of horizontal connections among sentient beings. We can think in terms of a spider-web metaphor or sangha (a community of Buddhist practitioners)—reaching and spanning outward, not upward.
We can also think of prayer as a form of right action (although traditionally right action means not stealing, no sexual misconduct, and not lying), which is the 4th path of the eight-fold path teachings of Buddhism (followed by right understanding, right intention, and right speech). The base of the 8-fold path is “right understanding,” which leads to the other 7 paths of the 8-fold path. Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield states on right understanding:
What do we really value, what do we really care about in this life? Our lives are quite short…In the beginning of practice we must ask what is most important to us. When we’re ready to die, what will we want to have done? What will we care about most? At the time of death, people who have tried to live consciously ask only one or two questions about their life: Did I learn to live wisely? Did I love well? We can begin by asking them now.
I still carry my uncle and Gene’s love within me—the ultimate remoteness. Love is what transcends time, place, and death—and the ultimate prayer of love is what we do have control over. Love, a power so powerful it transcends all barriers of place.
Death is the ultimate remoteness, so when we are still alive on Earth, how can we also express our love and compassion virtually and remotely?
Years after inheriting the Tibetan prayer wheel, I learned that the Sanskrit scrolls traditionally inserted in the wheel was a common prayer—Om, Ah, hum, Vajra Padma siddhi Hum (also known as the Padmasambhava mantra/prayer). This prayer evokes the compassion of the teacher Padmasambhava, who represents our own mind. OM AH HUM are seed syllables that have a connection to body, speech and mind.
In other words, through the foundation of compassion (or we could also say love), we engage in the action of prayer with body, speech, and mind—prayers and actions ultimately linked together.
In our times of Covid, we can pray with each and for each other without being physically together. Maybe prayer comes to you in a secular context–maybe you prefer the term “wish” or “good thoughts.” We hold good thoughts and wishes for the people and situations we care about and love. We have our own free-will to wish for compassion, or pray for compassion. We have interconnectedness of life around us and through us. And maybe we pray to an interconnectedness of a universe or holy being beyond our bodies.
Love binds the beauty found within humanity and ourselves. That is our agency in prayer and wishes—compassion and love.
Whether we see that God provides free-will to us or that we are naturally designed this way by other occurrences, our free-will gives us agency to make a better world. That agency, or free-will, can include prayer—or good wishes or thankfulness for a better life and world that lies beyond our own egos or bodies.
We manifest love through action from our love of God, congregants, friends, family, or pets.
Likewise, we can look at what horizontal forms of prayer look like, especially when we can’t be together in these times. There is no deity necessary to pray to or a deity that bestows blessings on us that is separate (or maybe a deity is irrelevant in your theology). God is within, not separate from us. Or Buddha-nature is within us, not outside of us.
Most of us are fortunate enough in our lives to have someone who has given us love. The people who first come to mind may no longer be alive, but their love remains with us. Or our congregation is always here for you with love. That is the ultimate prayer—our agency to love one another, so that that love will live on, beyond time and space, as the connection of love never breaks.
Our good wishes, our love, our ability to connect with one another are our prayers in action.
We see injustice in the world, we protest. We see devastating illness of Covid in our communities, we pray with our love. We experience disconnectedness with one another, we pray with our ability to connect where connection isn’t happening—maybe it’s by zoom, maybe it is by phone, or maybe it is in the silence in a quiet place remembering the love we have for humanity that nourishes us and in unseen ways we connect with others that transcend sight, hearing, or touching, because that is the power that love gives us.
We can use our agency that God/the Universe has offered us today and all the days ahead, so that the day we reconvene in person, we build on that love and compassion, where that love and compassion never stalls in the moments in-between, as love is never absent—we just continually tap into the inexhaustible well of love.
We can only imagine the possibilities of what lies ahead if we love each other every moment of every day in these days of Covid.
We know our community needs love. We know our loved ones need love. We need love. And we have the power of love on our side to feel connected in times, where we feel so unconnected in these times.
And if you had your own personal call and response with the universe, what would it be?
Blessed Be, Amen
Topics: Prayer